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Introduction

It is always quite difficult to speak about the details of lives of the most Nath Siddhas, such as the exact time and the place of their birth, and about the minute facts of their biographies. The reasons of this are few, and one of the most important of them is that yogis usually don’t like to discuss the details of their lives, and speak about who they were before becoming ascetics.Renouncing the world and undergoing the ceremony of entering into the order of ascetics, always was taken very seriously in India, and was considered no less than dying and taking a new birth, with accepting the old personality of the newly initiated yogi as dead. The adepts who were entering into the order and passed through the ceremony of initiation were considered as being ‘Double born’ after it, as if they died once and have taken new birth. After the ceremony of initiation, new name was given to an adept, and the ceremony was performed, symbolizing his death. After it, he (in ideal) was obligated to break down all his previous relationships with the society he lived before and with his own family, literally ‘to become dead’ for them and for himself, and start new life from the zero point. From that moment he was compelled to leave behind all his attachments and ambitions he was cherishing before, and became totally absorbed in the practice of yoga and service of his of guru.

Even today, amongst the Natha Yogis it is considered as a bad-tone, to ask from a Yogi about his previous life and even about his previous name, if he himself not willing to tell it. Duty this reason, the details of the Natha Siddha lives available through few different sources, usually covered with obscurity and full of uncertainty and contradictions. Although there can be found some written information about the matter, it is near to impossible to make the right judgments about the place of birth and the family status of the most of the Natha Siddhas on its basis.

Similarly it is very difficult to speak about the exact place of death of the most Nath yogis. Even today, Nathas usually not write names of deceased yogis on the most of their tombs, and this is very ancient tradition. They considering it as useless, and never they would say that some of the Natha yogis has died (mara gaya). If you will say so, they immediately will correct you, by saying that yogis never dying but only changing their clothes, bana chordia (left his closes) or cola badal diya (changed his garment), what means that he left only his external appearance, his outfits but not died actually. It is the very important point to be ignored, that they identify themselves not with their physical bodies, but with their spirits. It is believed that after death the soul of yogi (spirit) wondering by its will being liberated, and he may take or not new birth it depends on his wish.

The another reason of the existence of so much uncertainty around this matter, is that the details of the lives of most well known Nātha Siddhas, were circulating in the form of legends and folk songs since long time, and existed in such state, for the hundreds of years. During this period of time, they were transmitted from person to person as an oral tradition, and were put on paper quite recently.

On practice it is often happening, that when we listening the same story from two different people, we could notice how much their accounts could be different from each other. Something would be omitted or forgotten by narrator, something would be added to dramatize story, and something would be exaggerated. Often storyteller would insert the details of some other story into the tale he is narrating, or mess the names, doing it by mistake (forgetting), or knowingly with purpose to dramatize it and make more exiting.

Approximately the same things have happened with the most legends about the Nātha Siddhas, each time the same story was repeated, it was accepting form, slightly different from what it was before, and often become mixed with the regional colors of areas it was narrated. Duty this reason today we have so many versions of the same legends depicting the lives of the Nātha Siddhas, circulating at the different parts of India. They all telling about the same events, but many times they are so much different and intermixed with each other, that it becoming very difficult to make right judgment what was the original story before it undergo through all these transformations.